History of sociology

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Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943) is the first sociologist to appear on a German postage stamp - enforced by Ludwig Erhard as Federal Chancellor .

The history of sociology is the history of science sociology . In a narrower sense, the history of sociology began in the mid-19th century with the work of Auguste Comte . Before that, there had been theories about the function and development of society in a broader sense since ancient times . In the early 20th century, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim were particularly influential in sociology to the present day .

Origins and Early Development

The emergence of “ sociology ” under this name is closely connected with the development of the bourgeois society in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and with the developing industrial society .

Protosociology

Yet sociological analyzes have been appearing since ancient times authors wrote works of a strongly sociological character. Call can be about Xenophanes , Polybius , Ibn Khaldun , Giambattista Vico and Adolph Freiherr Knigge .

As the establishment of a single science bound to theory and empiricism that was not based on models, sociology had its origin in Niccolò Machiavelli's theory of action , in Adam Smith's epochal work on the wealth of nations (1776), in Adam Ferguson and among the early socialists such as Henri de Saint-Simon ; also in the action theories of German idealism , which still influence sociological explanations and their epistemological orientations. There were tendencies towards abstract modeling in David Ricardo in 1817 . However, they only became significant around 1870 with the emergence of a mathematically based theory of subjective utility and market equilibrium .

Immediate forerunners are history, jurisprudence, economics, but also journalism and police science .

Its forerunner Karl Marx is also read as a sociological classic today, and Friedrich Engels also presented an important, albeit 'committed', sociological study with “ The Situation of the Working Class in England ” around 1844. Marx and Engels can be attributed to a co-founding of modern sociology, especially because in their book of 1845, Die deutsche Ideologie , both clearly renounce philosophy (especially Hegel's ) and justify a "positive science" that, however, supports the empirical analysis of the To interpret reality and facts procedurally , whereby the dialectic becomes a specifically Marxian dialectic, which means little more than the social process in the sense of social evolution. A simple positivism is avoided.

Lines of development in sociology from Comte to Parsons

The word “ sociology ” was first coined by Auguste Comte in the mid-19th century - composed of the Latin socius ( common ) and the Greek λόγος ( lógos , word). He had a kind of social physics in mind, a (“positive”) natural science of the social based on a few universal laws . Comte's ideas were quickly rejected - his term “sociology” remained. Pierre Guilleaume Fréderic Le Play founded modern social statistics and researched socially relevant topics.

Gabriel Tarde attributed social events primarily to imitation. For him this included u. a. naive imitation, conscious imitation, instruction, education and obedience. In today's specialist discourse, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim are singled out as the founders of sociology . Durkheim added the aspect of normative regulation to the explanation of the social as an interpsychic event. Georg Simmel deepened his insight into the structured nature of the social by anticipating the theory of the social role. With the distinction between community and society, Ferdinand Tönnies once again brought a “substantialist” approach to sociology. In contrast, Weber developed a “procedural” theory with the category of social action, which he compared to Durkheim's approach to the aspect of the orientation of action Expectations and opportunities expanded. Talcott Parsons unified these theoretical approaches using concepts from George Herbert Mead and Alfred Schütz to form a general theory of action. In doing so, he examined the structural framework conditions of action and developed this structural-functionalist approach into a theory of the social system . Alternatively, communication-theoretical approaches and theories of symbolic action have prevailed since the 1960s.

The founders of sociology also include (with a clear historical-philosophical orientation) the Englishman Herbert Spencer , the Pole Ludwig Gumplowicz with his work on the integration of minorities, the Italian Vilfredo Pareto , who made contributions to the theory of ideologies, and the American Thorstein Veblen who, like the German Werner Sombart , dealt with the emergence of business elites and the role of luxury . The British representatives of social anthropology are among the thought leaders of structural functionalism .

  • Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

  • Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

  • Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), monument in Husum

  • Georg Simmel (1858–1918)

  • Max Weber: Science as a Profession , 1919

  • Talcott Parsons (1902-1979)

In Great Britain, the London School of Economics was founded in 1895 . It can be seen as a breakthrough for a social theory that integrates theory and factual research. In the USA, the first department of sociology was created at the University of Chicago in 1892 . The German Society for Sociology was founded in 1909.

Sociology in Germany

In Germany, in 1887, the first study on the establishment of today's subject sociology, " Community and Society " by Ferdinand Tönnies was published. Together with Georg Simmel and Max Weber, he is considered the founder of German-speaking sociology and was the first president of the German Society for Sociology until 1933 . The first full professorship in sociology was held by Franz Oppenheimer in the newly proclaimed Republic of Germany since 1919 .

Sociology in the sense described above was unable to develop further in Germany under National Socialism : it even removed an old man like Tönnies from service . Many other, younger, partly Jewish sociologists who were forced to emigrate later made important contributions to the development of the subject in the USA, such as Karl Mannheim with his work on ideology theory, but also z. B. in Switzerland, in Denmark (according to Theodor Geiger , a founder of the theory of social stratification), in exile in Turkey and in New Zealand. The specialist colleague Hanna Meuter , also a victim of the civil service laws of 1933, regretted in 1948 that “of the former 150 members of the German Society for Sociology, over half, not unaffected by the extermination processes of the time, are no longer with us today.”

On the other hand, the so-called “German Sociology” was expanded under the National Socialists in some areas of empirical research and, like other sciences, was instrumentalized as an ideological support of the worldview. So there was definitely a sociology under National Socialism . Chairs at German universities were partly renamed as those for philosophy ( Arnold Gehlen ), political science ( Hans Freyer ) or other. Many sociology professors were members of the NSDAP or professional organizations dominated by it, such as the NS-Dozentbund . Gehlen's institutional theory, in particular, remained internationally influential well beyond 1945.

Until the 1960s, sociology chairs were relatively rare, measured by the later expansion, then sociology gained social importance in the Federal Republic of Germany; Because of this and in the policy of educational expansion , numerous chairs and institutes were founded. Particularly noteworthy is the inauguration of Bielefeld University , which was inaugurated by the then very influential but also controversial sociologist Helmut Schelsky because of his National Socialist past and which is still considered a sociological heavyweight today. In the course of the student movement , the number of sociology students skyrocketed in the second half of the 1960s.

In the GDR , so-called bourgeois sociology was massively hostile. A Marxist-Leninist sociology was established that also affected the FRG. There was also a narrowly defined sociology in the GDR that emerged at the beginning of the 1960s . With the collapse of the GDR there were numerous new professorships there. In the meantime, sociological chairs and sometimes entire institutes are increasingly falling victim to the red pen.

In the post-war period, Helmut Schelsky (see the Leipzig School ) and René König were influential, also on the international sociological debate, and from around 1965 - and even more so - in particular the Frankfurt School ( critical theory ) with names such as Theodor W. Adorno and later Jürgen Habermas and Oskar Negt . In the recent period is mainly due to the systems theory Niklas Luhmann pointed out.

International

French intellectuals made a particularly large contribution to the development of sociology, starting with Enlightenment protosociologists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau , then Henri de Saint-Simon , through his pupils Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, who learned about the equally important Gabriel Tarde and Arnold van Gennep was able to ignore Marcel Mauss and Maurice Halbwachs to contemporary French sociologists and philosophers such as Pierre Bourdieu , Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault .

Herbert Spencer, Max Gluckman and Anthony Giddens from Great Britain, Vilfredo Pareto from Italy, Ludwig Gumplowicz and Bronisław Malinowski from Poland , Rudolf Steinmetz from the Netherlands , and Gilberto Freyre from Brazil should also be mentioned.

For North America, important milestones in the development of sociology include Thorstein Veblen, then the Chicago sociological school around Robert Ezra Park , the structural functionalism established by Talcott Parsons, and the theory of rational decision, which is strongly oriented towards economic premises . The situation is different in Great Britain, where a powerful social anthropology ( ethnosociology ), thanks to the problems that followed colonialism , is sociology i. e. S. strongly prevented the emergence. Even the symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology were brought from the US to Germany. The influence of US sociology in particular was clearly noticeable when sociology was re-established in the Federal Republic of Germany - often in the form of a reimport.

Today sociology is an institutionalized science worldwide. This is shown by the existence of the International Sociological Association ( ISA ) and its world congresses, as well as in an increasing look beyond the edge of nation-state 'containers' to world society and globalization processes . However, individual overviews, such as those of Indian or Australian sociology, are still rare.

literature

  • Pierre Saint-Arnaud: African American Pioneers of Sociology: A Critical History , University of Toronto Press, 2009
  • Bálint Balla : Sociology and History. History of sociology. Reinhold Krämer, Hamburg 1995.
  • Wolfgang Bonß: Practicing the factual view. On the structure and change of empirical social research. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1982.
  • Craig Calhoun (Ed.): Sociology in America. The ASA Centennial History , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007
  • Michaela Christ and Maja Suderland (eds.): Sociology and National Socialism: Positions, Debates, Perspectives . Suhrkamp 2014, ISBN 3518297295 .
  • AH Halsey : A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature, and Society. Oxford University Press 2004.
  • Joachim Fischer , Stephan Moebius (Hrsg.): Sociological schools of thought in the Federal Republic of Germany , Wiesbaden 2019 ISBN 978-3-658-22222-2 .
  • Hermann Korte : Introduction to the History of Sociology. 8. revised Edition. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-531-14774-9 .
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  • Volker Kruse : History of Sociology , UTB basics, 3rd edition, UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, Konstanz / Munich 2018, ISBN 9783825249366 .
  • Barbara Laslett, Barrie Thorne (Eds.): Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement. Rutgers University Press 1997, ISBN 0813524296
  • Wolf Lepenies (ed.): History of sociology. Studies on the cognitive, social and historical identity of a discipline. 4 volumes, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-518-07967-0 .
  • Heinz Maus : History of Sociology. In: Werner Ziegenfuß (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Soziologie. Enke, Stuttgart 1956, pp. 1-120.
  • Heinz Maus: Report on sociology in Germany 1933–1945. In: Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology . 11 (1959) 1, pp. 72-99.
  • Heinz Maus: A Short History of Sociology. Routledge & Keagan Paul, London 1962.
  • Heinz Maus: On the prehistory of empirical social research. In: René König (Ed.): Handbook of empirical social research. Vol. I, Enke, Stuttgart 1967, pp. 18-37.
  • Stephan Moebius: Practice of the history of sociology. Methodologies, conceptualization and examples of research in the history of sociology. Kovac, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-8300-1323-X .
  • Stephan Moebius: The sorcerer's apprentices. Sociological history of the Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939). UVK, Konstanz 2006, ISBN 3-89669-532-0 .
  • Stephan Moebius, Andrea Ploder (ed.): Handbook of the history of German-speaking sociology. Volume 1: History of Sociology in German-speaking Countries , Wiesbaden 2018, ISBN 978-3-658-07614-6 .
  • Stephan Moebius, Andrea Ploder (ed.): Handbook of the history of German-speaking sociology. Volume 2: Research design, theories and methods , Wiesbaden 2017, ISBN 978-3-658-07607-8 .
  • Reinhard Müller: Marienthal. The village - The unemployed - The study. StudienVerlag, Innsbruck / Vienna / Bozen 2008, ISBN 978-3-7065-4347-7 .
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Magazines and yearbooks

  • Yearbook for the history of sociology. Leske + Budrich, Opladen since 1990, ISSN  0939-6152
  • Current Sociology. Vol. 50, H. 1, Special issue on: Latin American sociology. (Guest Ed.) Roberto Briceño-León, London a. a. Sage, 2002.
  • Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines.
  • Social Science History. Journal of the Social Science History Association

Web links

Explanations

  1. ↑ Jürgen Osterhammel: The transformation of the world. A story of the 19th century. CH Beck. 2nd edition of the 2016 special edition. ISBN 978 3 406 61481 1 . P. 55
  2. ↑ Gabriel Tarde: Les lois de l'imitation. 1890.
  3. ^ Émile Durkheim: De la division du travail social: Étude sur l'organization des sociétés supérieures. Paris 1893; Ders .: Les règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris 1895.
  4. ^ Georg Simmel: Sociology. Studies on the forms of socialization. Berlin 1908.
  5. ↑ René König: The Fischer Lexikon Sociology. Frankfurt 1968, p. 17.
  6. ^ Talcott Parsons: The Structure of Social Action. A Study in Social Theory with special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. 4th edition, New York / London 1966.
  7. ↑ Jürgen Osterhammel: The transformation of the world. A story of the 19th century. CH Beck. 2nd edition of the 2016 special edition. ISBN 978 3 406 61481 1 . P.56
  8. ↑ Reference should be made to the distinctions between sociology , social theory , social and cultural anthropology, which diverge from German usage .
  9. ↑ See here, however, the ISA journal International Sociology . Vol. 24, H. 5, 2009, pp. 663-668, 669-681.
  10. ↑ Cord Riechelmann / FASZ May 1, 2015, p. 40: The everyday normality of violence (review)